Karal can tell that they're people who would admire one another.   It hurts - it feels like a betrayal of the people he loved and served all his life, except that yes, it was a tragic pointless wasteful war and he has a wider enough view now to see that they have all betrayed each other in allowing it to happen, and that doesn't hurt any less.  He could tell himself that they can all do better now, but they cannot all do better, Kadrich is dead-- 

--and he cannot think about that, right now. 

Leareth trusts him to make things better, and it would make nothing better to let this pain spread, instead of holding it in and trying to make something that isn't a pointless tragedy happen this time.  That thought is enough that he can try to live in the world that is so much larger than what he has known before, in which that death was not the most important thing in his life, in which what happens next matters more than everything he's lived through.  He had been half living in that world already, but he hadn't deliberately made the decision, and - making it, too, hurts, but it's a better feeling.  A release, of sorts - not from the pain, which will always be there, but from some bondage to it.  Unnoticed tension disappears from the set of his body, and he leans back and looks at Vanyel again - like at a good man he barely knows, rather than a distressing phantom.

This doesn't mean he has any idea what Leareth and Vanyel's many years of slow negotiation were about or what direction they could have usefully been leading in.  But he can start from where they are, he supposes.  And from normal human conversation, rather than pushing back into topics they cannot take too much of at once.

"At least say if you believe me, or if I should be trying to think through what to do if you don't."  He thinks the man believes him.  But trust works better when said out loud.

"And will you sit down, instead of standing over me all night?  I promise I won't try to stab you again."  A bit of a rueful smile, with that.

Vanyel blinks. Shakes his head, more in embarrassment than negation. 

"...I don't think you're trying to tell an elaborate lie. It's - bizarre, but I'm sure you also noticed that." Doesn't Leareth have people who work for him? ...Well, Karal didn't actually say they weren't with Leareth's people, just that Leareth is sick and can't talk, and it's not like anyone other than Karal can take Leareth's place in the dream to speak for him. 

"And - sorry." Self-conscious shrug. "Even if you did stab me, it's a dream. I figure Leareth was only willing to talk to me like this because I can't stab or, well, Final Strike, him." 

He can use the false magic that the dream gives him to shape a couple of stools for them, and put up a windbreak and a heat-spell. It's still not comfortable but it's less uncomfortable than sitting on the ground. 

He nods at the first reply, and appreciates the magical comfort, although he was already a lot more comfortable than what he's had to get used to recently.

"That sounds like him." 

He tilts his head curiously.  "Would you, if you could?"

What a horrifically unfair question

"...I'm not sure. I mean, I absolutely would have ten years ago, so the conversation wouldn't exactly have gone anywhere. But... I don't know." 

Shrug. "Probably I still would, if I did somehow have the chance?" Though Vanyel doesn't sound entirely convinced by his own words. "I mean. It's not like he's ever said he had stopped planning to invade Valdemar. Or explained why. ...I figure you know why but, um, obviously I don't expect you to just tell me, if Leareth thinks he had a good reason for not telling me." 

"I do know, and I don't think I should tell you."  He doesn't think it would make anything better, not now.  (And... Vanyel has clearly had enough horror without Karal adding to it.)

"I'm not even sure what I think of it myself, yet."  They don't have access to the records that would give him any chance of making sure that the awful idea makes sense the way Leareth claims it does - and even if it does, he still needs decide for himself whether he thinks it could possibly be right, to do something like that.  He said he would help Leareth get home, and he will, but he can still spend the rest of his life trying to convince him he's wrong.  "But... he really is trying to do the right thing, in his incredibly strange way."

He wonders if Leareth ever told Vanyel that, or if he's spent the last ten years maintaining his principle of never making himself sound any better than necessary.

...Leareth is not in fact sure he's made that claim to Vanyel in those words, but mostly because "doing the right thing" is - a pretty underspecified concept. Many people, maybe most people, are trying to do the right thing, and the thing they mean isn't at all what Leareth is trying to do, and - he doesn't want Vanyel to be confused.

A lot of Leareth's thoughts here are implicit and going by very fast, happening on a level more like intuition than his usual deliberate style of reasoning which is so badly impaired by the compulsion and their physical condition. There's something he's trying for and it probably won't work, most of the time it doesn't work, but - you have to reach for cooperation every time - the thing he's trying for won't work unless Vanyel actually understands, and the unlikely path to Vanyel actually understanding runs through Vanyel not being confused about who and what Leareth is. 

He's said a lot of things to Vanyel, and the important parts weren't any claims he made about himself, which Vanyel has no reason to take at face value and plenty of reason to suspect as manipulation - the important things are...things that are true the way math is true, things that Vanyel can hold up against the world and assess for himself. And he has, he thinks, seen that change how Vanyel thinks and acts in the world, Vanyel is already in many ways less...bound by an unreflected-upon code of honor...than the rest of the Heralds...

Snort. "Glad we can agree that Leareth is an incredibly strange person."

Vanyel looks past Karal at the horizon. "...I don't think I can take anything you say as - proof of what Leareth really wants - even if he can't hide who he is from you, how do I know he didn't just - use a compulsion to make you feel the way he wants you to feel?" Shrug. "But it's - information, I guess. ...And I do think - did already think - he probably wasn't lying to me that he - cares about his principles. In his own bizarre way." 

Leareth is probably right that that's the important goal, but Karal cannot convey any additional insights into the sorts of things that are true the way math is true.  He barely even knows any math - or any relevant facts about the world, since even Leareth remembers very few of them.  All he can do is... try to provide a second perspective on all their interactions.  Let all three of them know each other, to the extent that he can.  Things that are just true are important, but it is, also, important to know people.  Karal's own reaction to Leareth did not rely on anything but that, and he doesn't think it was wrong for it.

He chuckles and nods at Vanyel's first comment.  Then: "You know, that's a very good question, why didn't he do that...  Well, because he's the sort of person who wouldn't without a better reason," Karal has no illusions that Leareth wouldn't have done it if it was the only way to accomplish something very important, but not if he could get it in a more honest way, and not just for the sake of misleading Vanyel, leaving aside the part where he doesn't want to do that anyway.  "But also I... don't think compulsions work that way?"  He's not sure, but between watching this one work and catching Leareth's half-formed thoughts about the subject, he doesn't get the impression it would work.  (And if the Sunpriests could do that, a lot of the war would've looked different.)

It's not really that he expects to fully convince Vanyel, when he's sure of very few things himself - it's just that talking to him without aiming for anything in particular will let them get used to each other, and maybe let them find some things they didn't realize they needed to talk about.

... For instance if Vanyel is sure that compulsions do work that way, Karal would very much like to know that.  Less because he's worried about himself, and more because of what it'd mean about more complicated things that might be wrong with Leareth's mind.

Vanyel is making an odd face. "I mean, no, I've never heard of anyone who could do that. I try not to assume that means Leareth can't. No one else is two thousand years old either." 

Leareth's reaction is a burst of tired, bitter almost-amusement. Vanyel has such a tendency to assume that Leareth can do literally anything that would be convenient for him, and - it's not even that it's an incorrect paranoia for him to have, he thinks he mostly hasn't tried to nudge Vanyel away from that thought-pattern and has maybe even sometimes pointed out ways that Vanyel ought to be more paranoid toward Leareth. Just. There's something that feels deeply ironic about the fact that, if Leareth could in reality do half of the things Vanyel thinks he can, he would have already succeeded. 

I can see why he does, he thinks wryly to Leareth, who never exactly gave the impression of wanting to be seen as human.  (Karal wonders how it would have gone with them, if it wasn't for... all of this.  Would Leareth ever have felt entirely human to him, if he didn't see him helpless and confused?)

But yes, it wasn't only that - it's simply easy to feel that way about people so much more powerful or skilled that their limits are somewhere high past where your understanding of the world ends.  And...

"We thought you could do anything too, sometimes."

It's hard to say words again, now that he's letting himself remember.

"Of course you couldn't, when I think clearly about it, but..."  It was very hard, to think clearly.  Even now it isn't much easier.

Vanyel's eyes widen slightly. For a moment, there's a startled, naked hard-to-name emotion in his eyes. 

(It feels ridiculous, that anyone would compare him to Leareth of all people - that anyone would feel the way toward him that he's felt toward Leareth for the last decade of his life. But - of course it makes sense - there's a dizzying sense like falling through a mirror, the world seen from inside out, absurd yet perfectly coherent. Of course the Karsite soldiers on the other side feel that way toward him. Some of the junior Heralds probably feel that way toward him – everyone who wasn't there when he was a hopeless seventeen-year-old.) 

None of my power can accomplish anything that actually matters. That I actually want. 

 He doesn't say it out loud; he's not sure he trusts the thought, some part of him is remembering to poke at the grey fog of resigned despair, and also it would just be whiny. He's not going to be whiny in front of Leareth, even if Leareth...isn't really present in the conversation right now, he's still there. 

"That makes sense." There's a cold remoteness in Vanyel's manner for a moment, and then he seems to notice it and shake himself slightly. "...For what it's worth, I - don't think I really think it's that likely Leareth - did something to your head, to control what you say to me." Shrug. "Just. He'd tell me to be paranoid about it." Probably be quietly disappointed if Vanyel wasn't being paranoid enough, and it's also absurd that Vanyel cares if Leareth is quietly disappointed in him, but - a lot of things about this entire conversation are absurd, aren't they. 

It's clear on the Herald's face, for a brief moment, that he didn't know-- not that he would've done anything differently if he had known, not that he should have done anything differently, Karal knows that even through the swirl of tangled grief - but it still helps, somehow, that he didn't.  That he felt just as lost in all of it as they were. 

Karal thinks he's starting to like him, gods help him, and - all his contradictory emotions about that are definitely something he should deal with later.  What they are trying to do here is move forward, even if he has no idea how - and of course their thoughts will keep circling back to the war, one way or another, but he can't let them be trapped there.  It's not the most important thing, any more.

But really it's the last thing Vanyel says, with its equally complicated but still clear fondness for Leareth, that makes it abruptly easier to think about the present instead of the past.  They do have that in common, surprising as it is - surprising on both their parts, Karal realizes, amused.  (And wonders what it says about Leareth, that people who so obviously should be his enemies end up feeling like this about him instead.)

"He probably would," a slight smile.  "It's just... confusing, to try to have this conversation while I know I can't prove to you that he hasn't done anything to me, or that I haven't done anything to him. He'd be much better at it."  And where do they go from here...  He doesn't know, but he thinks they've gotten to the point where he can just ask.  "Do you... have any questions for me?  I don't know what the two of you have been talking about for the last ten years."